Some Kind Of Monster

No, not the documentary about the sad men who make up the world’s most famous metal band. For Halloween, I slayed a Monster. As the photo demonstrates, it’s a 40-stage multicache, requiring over 100 miles of travel to achieve. I’ve been working on this one in bits and pieces for almost the entire time I’ve been geocaching. A friend and I found a cache near the starting point and, while she opted to not even consider taking on something this difficult, I figured why not? A find here and a find there and some contact with others when something was missing and I made it! I thought of photographing the stages as I went along, but I opted not to. I didn’t want to give anything away. But I couldn’t not picture the final.

As a side note, I almost couldn’t sign the log. As we all know, I lost my pen. Luckily, I carry a spare in my bag but it wasn’t writing. I have a spare pencil that I pulled out of a cache, but I left that back in the car half a mile away, and the pen in the cache itself wasn’t writing either. So there I was at the end of this 5.0/4.0 without an implement to write with! So there I was, rolling the ink cartridge in my hands, trying to warm it up on this cold day. Finally, it got enough ink moving to give my scratching in the log some kind of definition and place my name among the luminaries. For the longest time I have said that if a person can’t sign a 1.5/1.5 because they forgot a pen, I’ll let it go, but if you’re claiming a 5.0/5.0 without signing it for the same reason, I call shenanigans. Well, I have to rethink that now. I was at the thing with all the plans made and signing almost couldn’t happen. So maybe I can be less judgmental. But more importantly, I’ve filled a Fizzy hole and a Jasmer hole to go along with the glory of victory. Happy Halloween, indeed…